Even in times of extreme darkness, rays of light find their way through. Victor and Brandy Prati have managed to find a little good in spite of their dire situation.

Go back to April 3 — the day that Brandy Prati got confirmation from her brother that something wasn’t right with her 17-month-old daughter, Zola.

“I had been asking everyone in my family, ‘Do you think her stomach looks big?’ and everyone kept saying, ‘No, she’s healthy Brandy, she’s healthy,’” Prati said. “She never had a sick day in her life, in fact she’d never even gone to the doctor except for a wellness visit. She was energetic, no symptoms at all.”

Still feeling that something was wrong, Prati asked her brother the question. He agreed and suggested she get Zola checked out. She called Zola’s doctor and got an appointment for the next day.

“The doctor knew right away. He said, ‘She has an enlarged liver … you need to go to Children’s Hospital in Little Rock today,’” Prati said.

This was Zola’s first trip to the hospital.

“They did an ultrasound. I knew right away that something was wrong, from the look on the lady’s face,” Prati said.

The family sat in the hospital for hours, not being told what was happening and fearing the worst.

“We thought, ‘Anything but cancer. I mean OK, she has an enlarged liver. They’re going to remove part of it. They’re going to treat her. Just please, not cancer,’” Prati said.

Finally, some news came. They were told a physician had been involved and that Zola was going to be admitted to the hospital. Then they were told they needed to go to the hematology/oncology unit.

Talking to the oncologist, the Prati’s learned a biopsy was needed to be done on Zola’s liver.

“The doctor said, ‘I’m pretty sure she has Hepatoblastoma.’ I said I’ve never even heard of that,” Prati said.

Hepatoblastoma is a very rare form of liver cancer. Ninty percent of the cases are in children under the age of 3. They only treat one or two cases at Children’s Hospital in Little Rock each year, so information is collected in a database complied by the 250 hospitals in the country that treat this form of cancer.

A biopsy is needed to confirm the diagnosis, but the doctor was pretty sure it was Hepatoblastoma based on the child’s levels of AFP, a protein in the liver that sort of detects this cancer.

Zola began her first round of chemotherapy on April 12.

“She gets four total cycles of three weeks each. The first round, I thought she was going to die, it was so hard on her,” Prati said. “The second round she only threw up a couple times and we took her completely off of her pain medicine. She’s on no medicine, no antibiotics by mouth, nothing. And I kept thinking, ‘This isn’t going to last.’”

It did last. Despite her parents’ fears, Zola continued to handle the chemotherapy surprisingly well.

“She had her third cycle on Tuesday, and she’s at home this weekend, still not on pain medicine, still just doing awesome. The doctors said that her body has tolerated the chemo remarkably well, so the cancer is dead, the tumor is dying,” Prati said.

With still one round of treatment to go, the Prati’s are hopeful the chemotherapy will continue to work as it has.

“The cancer is 99 percent dead. We’re pretty confident that it’s all dead, but she had a spot on her lung and we aren’t sure yet if it’s removed,” Prati said.

When Zola was diagnosed, she was at stage three, possibly stage four, cancer.

“You couldn’t ask for a better outcome for her at this point,” Prati said. “She’s really weak, but she still tries to walk. The first time was so hard, I didn’t see her smile for three and half weeks, but now she’s laughing and smiling and playing.”

Now 19 months old, Zola is living her life to the fullest.

“She makes huge messes,” Prati said. “You would think that a kid who doesn’t really walk wouldn’t do that. She used to be really messy because she was so busy, but now you think ‘How did this get here?’ We’ve never been so happy to have messes. It’s like a blessing to have messes. It’s weird.”

After her fourth cycle of chemotherapy, Zola will be rescanned to determine the next course of action. There is a slight chance that a resection will work, but based on the way the tumor grew, it is more likely that a liver transplant will need to be done.

The Pratis have already been in contact with a liver specialist in St. Louis and expect to make a trip there within the next month.

“I’m amazed every day when I see her. I keep expecting her to have a bad night or wake up feeling sick, but she doesn’t,” Prati said. “I count my blessings because she wakes up so happy. She wants to play with her animals. She loves farm animals and Dora. She’s thriving. She’s taking steps by herself. She’s a determined little one and half year old. She’s got stuff to do and she’s not letting it stop her from having fun.”

Zola continues to carry on, picking up new words every day and developing a new love of going for rides in the car.

“She has this one eye that is droopy from the neuropathy, so it’s almost all the way closed. She’ll just have this big grin and this one eye, and it just looks awful, but it’s the cutest awful in the whole world,” Prati said.

Throughout this process, the Prati’s have found comfort in the support they’ve been given.

“My husband is a physical therapist here. He works at Coulter P.T.,” Prati said. “They’ve just said, ‘You can come back whenever you want.’ I don’t think you could have a better employer than they’ve been.”

The family has also received many letters and words of support from people who have heard about Zola.

“It makes me feel good when I get messages and prayers from people,” Prati said. “People are just amazing.”

Information about fundraisers, updates on Zola and the opportunity to purchase “Team Zola” shirts can be found on the Facebook page Help Support Zola Prati.

“Children are really resilient, they say. I didn’t really believe that the first round. I thought, ‘There’s no way she can get through this,’ but I believe it now.”